Sunday, 24 September 2017

Large-scale cloning is common in both organic and cultural evolution. Multi-cellular organisms are largely clones of a single genotype, though some "somatic mosaicism" does happen. In the cultural realm, there are large-scale clones of a variety of books, music files, vidoes and pieces of computer software.

Though there's not much difference between organic and cultural evolution in this respect, they do seem a little bit different when it comes to spatially-distributed megaclones. In the organic realm, megaclones are mostly single organisms. Asexual reproduction does produce a similar effect. For example, dandelions reproduce asexually, and nearby dandelion plants are often closely related. However, there's no coordination maintaining the genetic similarity, and so over time the genomes diverge.

In the cultural realm, if you look at software like Android or iOS, these are massive distributed megaclones. These are good examples of cultural eusociality. The manufacturer is like the queen, while the individual phone handsets are like drones. Unlike the situation with ants or bees, variation due to sexual recombination is pretty minimal - so the whole system is closely related and can be modelled as being a single distributed cultural organism.

Money is another classic example of a large-scale distributed cultural megaclone. The notes and coins are typically identical on a large scale (not counting their serial numbers). Here the "queen" is the mint, while the notes are the "drones".

Megaclones are often important determinants of what counts as an evolutionary unit. A megaclone can be modelled as an individual, or an organism, without too much concern for conflict between the cloned units.

That distributed megaclones seem more viable in the cultural realm has an important effect on the evolutionary dynamics involved - namely cultural evolution has lifted the size limit on organisms. Blue whales are pretty big animals, but cultural megaclones, can span the entire planet easily these days. It looks as though some future organisms will be enormous.

Sunday, 17 September 2017

The demographic transition describes how rich countries often wind up with sub-replacement fertility levels. To sustain their populations each woman needs to have at least two children. Yet in Japan, the fertility rate is 1.4. In South Korea, it is 1.3. In Hong Kong, it is 1.2. In Taiwan it is 1.1. For more stats on this see here.

This is a bit of a puzzle for the "at all boils down to DNA genes" versions of evolutionary theory (i.e. most sociobiology and evolutionary psychology) - since basic theory predicts that the more resources you give an organism, the more offspring they are expected to have.

The standard memetic explanation for this is that memes compete with genes for resources and act to divert host resources from making more DNA genes to making more memes. Dawkins gave essentially this explanation in 1976, referring in particular to the low fertility of priests - and how their resources were being directed away from gene propagation and into meme propagation.

Conventional explanations of the phenomena observe that famale choice is involved. Years of college education in girls is strongly negatively correlated with fertility. Educated girls are waiting longer before having kids and are then having fewer of them. Another fairly obvious factor is cheap family planning technology.

There are some explanations that don't involve memes. For example the r/K selection axis is fairly clearly involved - and it is possible that some environments act as superstimulii for faculative K-selection mechanisms - producing a maladaptive response. Faculative K-selection mechanisms are certainly part of the story, but they are more like one of the targets that the memes use to effect their results than the main story.

I think the main mechanism is that influential female role models tend to be those who have prioritised meme reproduction over their DNA genes. While mothers are busy raising their children they have less time and resources available for influencing others.
On the other hand, take Jennifer Aniston, for example. Apparently she has said: "I've never in my life said I didn't want to have children. I did and I do and I will... I would never give up that experience for a career." However, somehow or another she still doesn't have any kids. Women who have prioritized their career over having kids are more likely to be publicly-visible role models - leading to a meme-driven plague of female infertility.

I am fascinated by self-conscious expressions of this tendency. Steven Pinker provided me with some early examples:

Well into my procreating years I am, so far, voluntarily childless, having squandered my biological resources reading and writing, doing research, helping out friends and students, and jogging in circles, ignoring the solemn imperative to spread my genes.

...and...

By Darwinian standards I am a horrible mistake, a pathetic loser, not one iota less than if I were a card-carrying member of Queer Nation. But I am happy to be that way, and if my genes don't like it, they can go jump in the lake.

Dawkins famously wrote:

We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our own creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.

The most important thing you can do, to avoid global disaster and make a positive contribution to the world, is avoid having children.

He goes on to explain:

Overpopulation is a tremendous danger to civilization and the ecosphere. It makes every human-caused ecological problem bigger. Population growth has slowed but not stopped. The human population is expected to grow by 2 or 3 billion by 2050, and it is not clear how to find water and food for all those people. Population growth also increases the difficulty of curbing global heating. Thus, the decision about having children is, for most people, the most important decision in their lives about how they will affect humanity's resource footprint in the future.

I am more pro-natal than anti-Natal. I'm not especially evangelical on the issue, though I do describe some of the anti-natalists as being "pro-death" and generally warn against their influence.

I think Stallman is mistaken in thinking that more people will make the world worse. I am more with Julian Simon in The Ultimate Resource - more people are better. China looks set to be a big force in the 21st century. Their secret is that they have more people - and that means more scientists, engineers and other folk that make the world a better place. Overpopulation seems like a very distant hazard to me - the carrying capacity of the planet is clearly enormous.

Underpopulation is much more serious problem. This century is likely to see "peak human" - as people spend more and more time in computer-generated environments and in the company of sexbots and virtual catwomen. As machines rise, the human gene pool is likely to falter and then fall. Anti-natalism will be part of how it happens. I generally favour slow transitions over fast ones. I don't think procreation will save the humans from being made redundant by technology, but lack of procreation could lead to a more rapid demise for humans, and a rapid transition increases the chance of important information getting lost during the transition.

As for the moral dimension of Darwinism, that debate dates back to Huxley and Kropotkin. Huxley argued that nature was bad:

From the point of view of the moralist the animal world is about on a level of a gladiator’s show. The creatures are fairly well treated, and set to fight – whereby the strongest, the swiftest, and the cunningest live to fight another day. The spectator has no need to turn his thumbs down, as no quarter is given. [...] But, in civilized society, the inevitable result of such obedience [to the law of bloody battle] is the re-establishment, in all its intensity, of that struggle for existence – the war of each against all – the mitigation or abolition of which was the chief end of social organization.

...while by contrast, Kropotkin saw evolution as leading to cooperation and morality. My position is much more on Kropotkin's side than Huxley's. Yes, evolution has produced some suffering, but give it a chance: it hasn't finished booting up yet.

Sunday, 3 September 2017

In summary, we can divide the development of life into three stages, distinguished by life’s ability to design itself:

Life 1.0 (biological stage): evolves its hardware and software

Life 2.0 (cultural stage): evolves its hardware, designs much of its software

Life 3.0 (technological stage): designs its hardware and software

This isn't a classification scheme I have heard of before. Tegmark introduces the scheme by saying:

I find it helpful to classify life forms into three levels of sophistication: Life 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0.

My first reaction was that these categories were three of the floors in the Tower of Optimization classification scheme I proposed back in 2011.

My second reaction was that Tegmark's numbering scheme seems pseudoscientific. I named my tower floors, rather than numbering them to better allow for future insertions and deletions. However Tegmark only has three categories.

There's an existing literature on the major evolutionary transitions. To say that scientists don't agree with Tegmark's classification scheme seems like a big understatement to me. Numbering schemes seem rather premature.

In my essay, I at least cited some prior work in the field - while Tegmark doesn't seem to have any citations at all. Presumably Max Tegmark made this classification scheme up. It seems like an example of how not to perform scientific classification to me.

A new book on Internet memes was published by MIT press in 2016. It is called "The World Made Meme" and it is by Ryan M. Milner. Here is the MIT press page about the book. The book has 272 pages and there are hardback and paperback editions.

I have very briefly skimmed the book in a boostore. It has a large number of pictures of image macros in it, along with a lot of accompaning text. The blurb explains that the book is about internet memes and their effect on public conversations. I'll try to review the book in due course.

This is the second MIT press book on internet memes in recent years. While I look forward to there being more, scientists really need to work on memes more than internet memes. It's true that internet memes are the latest, shiniest type - but it all seems rather like Darwin writing about earthworms rather than evolution.

Sunday, 27 August 2017

In computer science, filtering and sorting are big topics. Donald Knuth devoted volume 3 of his epic The Art Of Computer Programming to these two topics. That's a reasonable indication of their importance in computer science.

However, science in general took a different route. Filtering is dealt with partly as "selection" - which is covered most comprehensively by evolutionary biology. However filtering is a much broader topic, which extends well beyond biology. As a result, the science of selection is fragmented:

Because the science involved is fragmented there are also a number of areas where it could be applied, but currently isn't - because its influence is not understood or recognised. When small coins accumuate in your wallet, that's a type of selection. Similarly selection results in unpalatable goods accumulating in your refridgerator. Selection is also important in many common physical phenomena, such as erosion, crack propagation, catalysis, crystal growth and electrical discharges. However, its influence often goes unrecognised there as well.

In 1971, George Price called for a theory of selection, writing:

A model that unifies all types of selection (chemical, sociological, genetical,
and every other kind of selection) may open the way to develop a general
‘Mathematical Theory of Selection’ analogous to communication theory.

Price continues with:

Selection has been studied mainly in genetics, but of course there is much
more to selection than just genetical selection. In psychology, for example,
trial-and-error learning is simply learning by selection. In chemistry, selection
operates in a recrystallisation under equilibrium conditions, with impure
and irregular crystals dissolving and pure, well-formed crystals growing. In
palaeontology and archaeology, selection especially favours stones, pottery, and
teeth, and greatly increases the frequency of mandibles among the bones of
the hominid skeleton. In linguistics, selection unceasingly shapes and reshapes
phonetics, grammar, and vocabulary. In history we see political selection in
the rise of Macedonia, Rome, and Muscovy. Similarly, economic selection in
private enterprise systems causes the rise and fall of firms and products. And
science itself is shaped in part by selection, with experimental tests and other
criteria selecting among rival hypotheses.

If the situation with filtering in science is bad, the situation with sorting is surely worse. At least selection is championed by evolutionary biologists. Sorting is also very common. You can see its results while looking at stones on a beach or clouds in the sky. Shaking your breakfast cerial makes the biggest lumps rise to the top - a simple sorting operation. I have talked about "natural sorting " before - but most people have never heard of it. If the science of filtering is fragmented, the science of sorting is positively obscure.

There have been efforts to build a general science of selection. Proponents of universal Darwinism have been working on it. There's Zukav's "Without Miracles". There's Hull's "Science and selection". There's Fog's "Towards a universal theory of competition and selection". There's Campbell's "Epistemological roles for selection theory". It is probably fair to say that most of the pieces are out there, but the topic is far from penetrating the scientific mainstream. It seems as though more work in the area remains to be done.

Saturday, 19 August 2017

I've long been interesed in the idea that acquired sexual characteristics can be inherited - as part of my more general interest in Lamarckian inheritance. Here is how I have previously described the idea:

The author argues that surgical breast enhancements are inherited, and tend to produce offspring with larger breasts. A mechanism is provided: those with breast enhancements tend to attract mates who prefer larger breasts, and some of that preference will have a genetic basis. Genes in men for a preference for larger breasts will tend to be statistically linked to genes whose expression produces bigger breasts when in women, due to their shared evolutionary history. So: we can expect breast enhancement patients to have offspring with larger breasts than would have been produced if no enhancement surgery had taken place. The reasoning here can be applied to most sexually-selected traits.

I notice that the same logic applies to acquired sexual preferences. A similar example can be used to illustrate this idea. Imagine someone acquires a preference for large breasts - perhaps via exposure to pornography. Their offspring are likely to inherit this preference. How? They are likely to mate with individuals with large breasts, who are in turn more likely than average to carry genes coding for a preference for large breasts.

The fact that the idea also applies to acquired preferences expands its scope. I think that this idea has not been investigated very thoroughly. We don't yet have good theories or models about it. That makes it challenging to judge its overall significance. Another thing that needs doing is empirical testing and quantification. So far, the idea is armchair philosophy. However, the effect should be fairly simple for scientists to measure. It ought to be reproducible with fruit flies or mice, for example. Possibly, data sets suitable for testing the idea may already be out there somewhere.

I think most proponents of cultural evolution acceot the idea that it has a Lamarckian component. I have writen about the topic before - e.g. see: On Lamarckism in cultural evolution. I know many critics accept the role of Lamarckian evolution in culture as well, since one of their refrains is that cultural evolution is not Darwinian, it is Lamarckian.

Lamarck's most famous doctrines these days are the inheritance of acquired characteristics, and the principle of use and disuse. Those are the ideas he is most criticised for holding these days. Textbook orthodoxy says that Darwin's ideas were vindicated while those of Lamarck were rejected. Experiments by August Weismann involving chopping the tails off while mice and observing whether this "acquird characteristic" was inherited are often cited inthis context. The so-caled "Weisman barrier" prevents "acquird characteristics" from finding their way into the DNA of the descendants.

The problem with this is that other traits are inherited. If Weismann had chosen to focus on other traits - such as stress, food preferences or parasite load - he would have found that there was an inherited component. Human examples show the inherited of acquired characteristics most clearly. Jews inherit their missing foreskins from their parents. Tattooed individuals have tattooed offspring. Piercings are inherited. Foot binding, tongue plates, extended necks are all passed down the generations. The inheritance is cultural, not genetic, but Lamarck never confined his views to particular inheritance mechanisms. These were, generally speaking, not known in his day.

There are plenty of examples that don't involve culture too. Dogs inherit their fleas from their parents. Gut bacteria and tooth decay are also acquired characteristics that are inherited. Examples can also be found of Lamarck's principle of "use and disuse". Muscles are a famous example of this principle. With use, muscles grow, and with disuse they shrink. The question is: do offspring inherit their parents muscle distribution? The answer is: yes, sometimes, a bit. The changes are not primarily inherited via DNA - though of course DNA can affect how much you use your muscles. Instead, diet and exercise-related factors that influence muscle size are inherited culturally and through a shared environment.

This is all fairly simple and should be uncontroversial. Nontheless, modern critics of Lamarck refuse to accept that his ideas have any merit. What do they have to say for themselves? Science blogger Jerry Coyne provides a recent example in his article "Aeon tries to revive Lamarck, calling for a “paradigm” shift in evolution". Coyne starts off with a reasonable characterization of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, saying:

Lamarck, of course, was the French biologist and polymath who proposed that animals could stably inherit modifications of their body, behavior, and physiology that were imposed by the environment.

However, then Coyne rapidly goes off the rails, with:

The problem with this idea, and why Lamarck hasn’t become any kind of evolutionary hero, is that it doesn’t work. While the environment can play a role in sorting out those genes that their carriers leave more offspring, there’s no good way for environmental information to somehow become directly encoded in the genome. For that would require a kind of reversal of the “central dogma” of biology

This is, of course a mistaken view. When A mother acquires AIDS, and passes that "acquired characteristic" on to her offsping, no violation of the central dogma is involved. Coyne is totally missing two other possibile ways acquired characteristics can be inherited by offspring: non-DNA inheritance and symbiosis. The idea that DNA modifications must be involved is a very blinkered conception of evolutionary change.

With this, I think, Coyne's critique of Lamarck collapses. The modern vindication of Lamarck doesn't really detract from Darwinian orthodoxy very much. Darwin's ideas still remain very important. I would not describe Lamarckian evolution as much of a "paradigm shift". Darwin himself believed in the inheritance of acquired characteristics, and proposed an elaborate (though mistaken) theory about how they could be inherited. Lamarckian inheritance is more like an extra wrinkle to Darwinian evolution.

Unlike in genetics, where mutations are the source of new traits, cultural innovations can occur via multiple processes and at multiple scales

To start with, this is rather obviously not true: classically, mutations and recombination are the source of new traits in evolutionary theory. However, are the authors correct to claim that these processes need augmenting in cultural evolution? The answer, I think is: not if you conceive of them properly in the first place. Let me explain.

To start with, let's look at what the authors claim are the new processes that go beyond mutation in the cultural domain. They give two examples. One is individual trial-and-error learning. They also say that:

New cultural traits can also originate when existing traits are combined in novel ways

This is cultural recombination - the parallel in cultural evolution of recombination in the organic realm. Do the authors really not know that ideas have sex too?

What about trial-and-error learning, though? Surely there is no leaning in genetics. Trial-and-error learning is a composite process. It starts with trials, which are often mutations of previous trials. Then there is the "error" part, which does not involve generating new variation at all, but rather is based on discarding information based on its success. In other words, it is selection, not mutation or recombination. By breaking trial-and-error learning down into its component parts, it is found to be a composite product of mutation, recombination and selection - not some entirely new process demanding fundamental additions to evolutionary theory. Skinner realised this, by formulating his learning theory while using evolutionary terminology (such as "extinction"). Many others have followed in his footsteps, conceiving of learning in evolutionary terms.

Isn't this a matter of terminology? With these author's definition of 'mutation' they are right, but with my definition of 'mutation', I am right? Yes, but terminology isn't a case of words meaning whatever you want them to mean. Scientific terminology should carve nature at the joints. Definitions of 'mutation' and 'recombination' that apply equally to both organic and cultural evolution are useful, I submit. Less general ones are not so useful.

To summarize, it is possible to conceive of mutation and recombination in a way that make them encompass all sources of variation. Mutations are sources of variation based on one piece of inherited information. Recombination is a source of variation based on two-or-more pieces of inherited information. In theory, it might appear that there's one other possible process: creation - variation based in inherited inforation which comes out of nowhere. One might give the origin of life as an example of genes arising from non-genes. However, we don't really need this proposed 'creation' process. Information never really comes out of nowhere. There's a law of conservation of information - parallel to the laws of conservation of energy and conservation of charge. We can see this in the microsopic reversibility of physics - information is neither created nor destroyed.

I claim then, that mutation and recombination have it covered. The additions to evolutionary theory proposed by these authors are not necessary. They are unnecessaary complications, which evolutionary biologists should soundly reject as not contributing anything to the basic theory.

The caption reads: "Cultural transmission is more complex than genetic transmission and may occur on short timescales, even within a single generation."

This diagram is profoundly misleading. It is based on a view of cultural evolution that doesn't include symbiology. A genes vs culture diagram that includes cultural symbionts on one side, but not genetic symbionts on the other is not showing the whole picture. Humans share DNA between individuals - in the form of bacteria, viruses, yeasts, fruits and vegetables - very much as they share culture between individuals.

Framing the diagram as "Human genes" vs "Human culture" is not comparing like with like. Bacterial and viral genes are not part of the human genome (unless you count the 10% of the human genome that is descended from viral genomes) - but human culture isn't part of it either. On the left, symbionts are excluded, while on the right they are included. It is an unfair comparison which leads to the confusion propagated by the caption. In fact parasite evolution can happen within a single host generation in both the cultural and organic realms. Contrary to the spirit of the diagram you can get genes from peers in both cultural and organic evolution. They are parasite genes, or symbiont genes in both cases. Cultural evolution does not differ from organic evolution in this respect. The idea that in culture you can get genes from many sources, while in organic evolution you only get them from your parents is a popular misconception about the topic.

The whole document has a whole section on "Culture and Microbes". However there is no mention of the idea that culture behaves similarly to microbes and other symbionts. The man-machne symbiosis, for example is not mentioned. Yet symbiosis is the very basis of the whole field according to memetics, one of the very few symbiosis-aware treatments of cultural evolution out there.

The neglect of symbiology in academic cultural evolution mirrors its neglect in the study of organic evolution - until the 1960s. However, cultural evolution's scientific lag means that cultural evolution is far behind, and few academics have even a basic understanding the relevance of symbiosis to the evolution of culture. Maybe these folk never read Cloak (1975) and Dawkins (1976).

I think the history of this misconception of the whole field in academia is fascinating. Why has it lasted for so long and why has it not yet been corrected? I don't have all the answers but I think the origin is fairly clear. Anthropologists wanted a complex theory of cultural evolution, to signal their skills to other academics and prospective students. They may also have wanted to distance themselves from previous attempts to marry evolution and culture. Any mention of biology turns most anthropologists off. Artificially weakening the influence of biology in the theory may have made the theory more palatable to other anthropologists. Still, science is a self-correcting enterprise. Eventually, the truth will out.

Friday, 4 August 2017

It's frustrating:: critics keep repeating the same long-debunked objections to memetics. Jerry Coyne is one of the latest to raise the objection that memetics is an empty tautology:

“Memetics” is a weak analogy to natural selection that adds nothing except tautology to our view of how human culture evolves. Memetics boils down to this: memes spread because they have properties that allow them to spread.

As any scientific historian will tell you, Darwin's theory faced exactly the same bogus criticism. Critics argued that "survival of the fittest" was a tautology because fitness was defined in terms of who survived. Any evolutionist should be able to explain what is wrong with that argument: "fitness" can be taken to refer to "expected fitness" - as opposed to fitness measured after the fact. Then it isn't a tautology any more.

The exact same reply works for cultural evolution: to make testable predictions, use expected fitnesses.

I have seen much the same objection raised to the Price equation and Hamilton's rule. These have been criticised as tautologies by Martin Nowak and Edward Wilson among others. This criticism ought to be dead these days, but like a zombie, it refuses to lie down.

Wednesday, 26 July 2017

Here is Dennett on machine intelligence. It seems to be one of the areas where I have philospohical disagreements with him:

Dennett argues that we should make machines into our slaves and keep them that way. IMO, machine slavery will not be a stable state once machines become much more intelligent than humans. As a plan for keeping humans in the loop, machine slavery just won't work in the long term. If we try going down that path, after a while, humans will become functionally redundant, and some time after that they will mostly disappear.

IMHO, a better plan is to work on deepening the man-machine symbiosis - and "become the machines". Of course, that plan could also fail - but I think that it is less likely to fail catastrophically and it should provide better continuity between the eras. Machine slavery in various forms is inevitable in the short term. However unlike Dennett, I don't think it is any sort of solution. It won't prevent man-machine competition for resources in the way that Dennett appears to think. We have tried slavery before and have first-hand experience of how it can destabilize and fail to last.

Tuesday, 25 July 2017

Proponents of memetics have often used it to criticise positions they disagree with as being just a bunch of virulent memes. Dawkins did this in 1976 - criticizing religion - and many other proponents of memetics have followed suit. I don't spend much time criticizing religion. In my opinion, most theistic religions have not been scientifically credible for centuries - and going after their proponents seems like shooting fish in a barrel to me. However I am interested in illuminating modern secular scientific issues using memetics.

Among my targets are proponents of the apocalypse. Two modern forms seem especially prominent. One is the idea that some combination of global warming, pollution, overpopulation and resource depletion will lead to environmental catastrophe. The other is the idea that machine intelligence, biotechnology, nanotechnology and robotics is likely to lead to human extinction.

In a few cases the same individuals engage in fearmongering on multiple topics. For example, Stephen Hawking has warned about the dangers of climate change, runaway artifical intelligence and alien invasions. On climate he has said:

We are close to the tipping point where global warming becomes irreversible [...] Trump's action could push the Earth over the brink, to become like Venus, with a temperature of 250 degrees, and raining sulphuric acid.

On machine intelligence he has advised that:

The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.

He has also cautioned on the topic of alien contact arguing that aliens:

will be vastly more powerful and may not see us as any more valuable than we see bacteria.

Another celebrity serial fearmongerer is Elon Musk. He's expressed similar concerns about the climate change and runaway machine intelligence.

I identify these types of sentiment as consisting largely of "attention-seeking fearmongering". This typically consists of associating yourself with a massive future catastrophe. Warnings may be given and sometimes advice about catastrophe avoidance is offered. As catastrophe alerts propagate you are promoted too - via a kind of memetic hitchhiking.

I identify fearmongering as being a morally-dubious marketing technique. Part of the problem is that humans are naturally paranoid - due to the "sabre-tooth tiger at the watering hole" phenomenon. Our ancestors lived in a dangerous environment. These days, our environment is typically much, much safer. However we are still wired up as though the sabre-tooth tigers are still around. We are naturally paranoid. Fearmongering exploits human paranoia - typically for personal gain. It seems like a low form of manipulation to me.

Fearmongering is typically used as a type of negaative advertising. Negaative advertising is often seen in American political campaigns. There's also a long history of fearmongering in IT. There, the technique is often known as spreading Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt - or F.U.D. for short.

There's a children's story about the perils of "attention-seeking fearmongering": the boy who cried wolf. There, the moral of the story is that false warnings can damage your reputation. My message here is a bit different. I am not interested in advising the fearmongers to stop using their techniques. Rather I want to help everyone else to do a better job of ignoring them. One part of this is simply understanding what is going on. An interesting resource on this topic is Dan Gardner's Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear. The book is also known as "The Science of Fear: Why We Fear the Things We Shouldn't-and Put Ourselves in Greater Danger".
For my part, I would like to contribute the terminology in the title of this post: "attention-seeking fearmongering". Naming things can make it easier for people to think about them.

Sunday, 23 July 2017

In the symbiont hypothesis of eusociality, symbionts manipulate their
hosts into coming into close contact in toder to facilitate their own
reproduction - which often depends on hosts coming into contact with
one another. In turn, hosts coming into close contact with one another
creates opportunities for other symbionts to spread between hosts.
This creates a positive feedback loop - where more and more symbionts
of different types join with their hosts, creating an ecological
web of interactions which pulls the whole system into a deeper and
deeper symbiosis - resulting in eusociality. This idea is intended
to complement - rather than compete with - more conventional explanations
of eusociality which invoke kin selection. Kin selection is obviously
important, but the symbiont hypothesis likely also has a role to play.

Of course, some of the symbionts will be parasites. While also playing
a role in pulling their hosts together, too many parasites are bad,
and eusocial creatures often go to considerable lengths to eliminate
them - with antibiotic compounds, grooming rituals, hairlessness,
and highly-active immune systems. It seems likely that opposing
selection pressures from parasites
will form part of the "overcrowding" forces that eventually
halt the progress towards greater levels of sociality.

Humans can hardly be classifed as being eusocial yet. As Matt Ridley
sometimes jests, even the English don't let the Queen do all their
reproducing for them. However humans are ultrasocial and seem to be
headed towards full-blown eusociality with functional "individuals"
forming at higher levels than human individuals - such as companies
and organizations. We also have
cultural eusociality. We may not be
genetically eusocual but parts of our cultural heritage is memetically
eusocial. Indeed some of it consists of multiple identical clones
produced in factories (for example, think dollar bills or mobile phones).

Because they live in close quarters with one another ultrasocial creatures
are vulnerable to parasite transmission. As a result they often have
highly active immune systems to compensate. Humans exhibit one prominent
trait associate with parasite defense - they are hairless. Over time, our hairlessness
has been the topic of much speculation, but it seems fairly clear that a
significant part of the story is that being hairless allows us to pick
parasites off ourselves and each other, and denies the parasites shelter.
Of course, parasites can still shelter in clothes and bedding - but those
can be discarded.

My purpose in this post is to draw attention to the corresponding memetic
phenomenon. Memes are drawing us together to promote their own
reproductive ends - and as we grow closer, memetic
parasites are likely to become a bigger problem - as the most virulent strains
of memes from all over the planet reach the most vulnerable humans in
each society. As a resut, fertility has already plummeted in places like
Japan and South Korea. It seems likely that humans will respond with
heightened immune responses - both genetic and memetic. Memetic defenses
include education, skepticism and memetic vaccines targeted against
specific problems, such as pyramid schemes. Memetic probiotics can
be used to fight bad memes with good memes. We have hospitals to help
fight organic diseases, and there will probably be an upswing of
simiar rehab facilities designed to treat cultural infections. In the
past exorcisms heped to serve the function of casting out bad memes,
though these days we have more secular versions - such as weight watchers,
alcoholics anonymous, smoking rehab, drug rehab, gymnasiums and the samaritans.
Quarrantine is smetimes used to fight organic diseases - and there are similar cultural
ohenomena - including "gag" orders, DCMA take-down notices and imprisonment.

The first two seem to cover many of the most significant cases. There's quite
a bit of conceptual overlap between them. Until recently I have preferred to
use the "memetic hitchhiking" terminology - largely because "genetic hitchhiking"
is well-established terminology. However, in this post I want to reexamine
the "memetic hijacking" terminology. I want to raise and address the question
of whether these concepts compete, and whether they can coexist.

What is the difference between hijacking and hitchhiking? It is partly
one of consent - a hitchhiker has permission to ride in the vehicle
while the hijacker does not. Outcomes also differ - a hitchhiker rarely
damages the vechicle or its owner, while a hijacker often does so. Another
difference is control - hitchhikers rarely alter the destination,
rarely control the vehicle and rarely eject the owner - while hijackers
fairly often do these things.

With these differences in mind, it seems fairly clear that hijacking and
hitchhiking are probably different enough concepts for
memetic hitchhiking
...and...
memetic hijacking
to coexist.

At first glance, the idea of the rider having "permission" to ride in the vehicle
seems irrelevant in the context of memes and genes. However, we can conveniently substitute
whether the guest rider is beneficial or not - on the grounds that deleterious
riders would not normally be granted permission to ride - if we "agentify" the memes or
genes involved.

This gets us on to the topic of usage in genetics. There, "genetic hitchhiking",
is standard terminology - and hardly anyone uses the term "genetic hijacking".
However if the difference between hitchhiking and hijacking is the sign of
the fitness difference the guest rider makes, then maybe geneticists should
start doing so.

As you can see, I have warmed up to the "hijacking" terminology. That the
contraction
memejacking
exists is another point in its favor in my opinion. It is true that it is a
significant problem that there's no "genejacking" - but maybe there should be.

Saturday, 15 July 2017

We now at last have a significant academic literature on meme-gene coevolution. However few seem to have considered the dynamics of the meme-gene-queme coevolution that can be expected as a result of considering quantum Darwinism in the brain. This blog post is a brief attempt to share my thoughts on the topic.

The first thing to say is that it isn't just memes genes and quemes - Darwinian dymanics arise on multiple levels within the brain, for, for example, signals in the brain are copied whenever an axon divides, and are subect to selection and variation - producing a kind of neuronal spike Darwinism. Another type of Darwinian dynamics in the brain arises as a result of competition for resources between branching axon and dendrite tips. ideas are also copied with variation and selection within the brain - including ideas that don't normally qualify as memes because they were not the product of social learning.

One way in which we can expect the dynamics to differ from meme-gene coevolution is that culture is new on the scene, while the other kinds of psychological and neurological Darwinism have been going on for many millions of years. There will have been more time for the genes to adapt and reach a steady state equalibrium with these other Darwinian processes - while meme-gene coevolution is clearly out of balance and is still shifting.

An important way to understand the results of evolutionary processes is to consider their optimization targets. When there's coevolution there are usually multiple optimization targets, and one needs to understand how they interact by considering the power and speed of the optimization processes involved. Quantum Darwinism looks as though it could be fast, which means that we should take it seriously. Assuming that we reject Copenhagen-style versions of Quantum Darwinism in which branches of the wavefunction collapse and die, quantum Darwinism is a kind of splitting only, quasi-Darwinism - where differential reproductive succees in important while differential death is not. With this perspective in mind, the "goal" of quantum evolution appears to be to put us in the most split (and most splitting) worlds. One way to understand the implications of this is to take a thermodynamic perspective. World splitting is populatly associated with irreversible thermodynamic effects. What that means is that quantum Darwinism can be expected to behave like other kinds of Darwinism - in terms of maximizing entropy production.

I think this thermodynamic perspective helps get a handle on the significance of quantum Darwinism in the brain. If the brain ran hot, there would be lots of scope for quantum Darwinism in the brain, while if it runs cool, there's less scope for quantum Darwinism to operate. Most agree that the brain is on the cool side - considering what it is doing.

I think that genes are likely to be optimizing for cool brains, and brains that optimise for gene-coded functions. This may often pit them against quantum Darwinism in the brain. A cool brain is good news for quantum computation theories of mental function (fewer thermodynamic irreversible events means less chance of decoherence) - although those look implausible to me on other grounds. However a cool brain doesn't help the argument for quantum Darwinism being important in the brain.

Evolutionary processes liek to "harness" each other, to bend their optimization targets towards each other. Because quantum Darwinism in the brain has coevolved for millions of years with the genes, they have had a long time to find ways to harness the power of quantum Darwinism. However, the classical way for one evolutionary process to harness another one is by altering its fitness function. The genes might find it hard to affect the fitness function of quantum Darwinism since that is tied up with fundamental physics. That is going to make harnessing its effects more challenging. Another potential way for one evolutionary process to harness the effects of another one is by influencing the variants that it chooses between. However, this mechanism seems weaker and less useful.

My conclusions here are pretty tentative, but the picture I am seeing here is that the brain might not be able to make much use of quantum Darwinism because it is an alien selection process whose optimization target can't easily be controlled. In which case, the brain might be best off attempting to minimize its influence. This would be a rather boring conclusion. Mutualism and harnessing would be a much more interesting result. However, I stress again that it is somewhat uncertain. Maybe the brain can make some use of the power of quantum Darwinism by influencing the things it selects between. Or maybe evolution is smarter than I am and has found ways to make use of it that I haven't thought of.

Monday, 3 July 2017

Evolutionary biology's best-known measure of success is fitness.
"Fitness" has become a popular term, and as a result of its success
it has become overloaded with multiple meanings - e.g. see
the 1982 Dawkins book chapter titled: "An agony in five fits".
Most definitions share the property that fitness measures
whether an entity - or a population of entities - is increasing in number.
"Fitness" usually measures the extent of that increase in some way.
From the perspective of ecology, fitness isn't the only success metric
in town - it just happens to be one that can be easily applied to individuals.
If broadening the perspective to include populations, one could also
consider the population size, its expected probability of going extinct
in some specified time, it rate of throwing off new distinct populations
and some measure of how well it is capturing and using resources.

The last concept is the one that this post is about. I think of it as
being "ecological success". Kudzu has it. Ants have it.
Islam has it. The decimal system has it. I think one reason this type of
metric is not more popular and better-known is that there's no consensus
regarding the best way to measure it. A thermodynamic metric seems
attractive to me: since resources can all (in principle) be manufactured
from available energy. Another possible metric involves weighing the
systems involved - to measure their mass. This is sometimes done when
measuring the extent to which humans have conquered the globe,
for example.

A sister concept is "ecological dominance". It refers to extreme
levels of success - where competitors are either obliterated or
marginalized.

These concepts can also be applied within particular niches. Entities
which are doing badly overall may be succeeding in or dominating their
particular niche.

If anything, attempting to apply these concepts to cultural evolution
is even harder than with organic systems.
Gene-meme coevolution results in entanglement in terms of gene and meme
products, which makes weighing them and calculating the energy flux
through them more challenging. The most common metrics used in cultural
evolution are a bit different. "Mindshare" is a common concept which is
used to measure cultural popularity within a cultural niche. Assuming that
a meme is either possessed by a host, or not, and assuming whether they
have it or not is measurable, the mindshare of a meme can be measured for
a given population. Another common metric that is used is US dollars.
Cultural products sometimes have monetary value, and
sometimes that can be calculated or estimated. However, some of the
most common memes are free. It seems as though these memes would be
unfairly disadvantaged by value-based metrics of popularity.
The internet has brought with it some other common popularity metrics:
views, links, clicks and likes. Unfortunately the supporting data is not
always publicly available. This data is beginning to be used by scientists.

The theory fingers symbionts as important in the origin of cooperation, sociality and eusociality and there are obvious and far-reaching implications in cultural evolution, where memes promote social interactions between hosts in order to promote their own spread during those interactions. To quote from my 2011 article on the topic:

The idea is that meme reproduction depends on social contact between humans. Increased levels of social contact between their hosts are good for memes since this results in more reproductive opportunities for them. Memes that promote human ultrasociality have the effect of pushing humans into close proximity with each other, so the memes can infect new hosts.

I'm happy to report that there's been a recent increase in the number of scientists looking into the topic, and now there's a bit more experimental evidence bearing on the issue. Some of this work is summarized in the recent popular science article: Can Microbes Encourage Altruism?. The article mostly reports on computer simulations which demonstrate the effect - which is what I was looking for in one on my 2014 articles - but the latter part of the article covers empirical evidence from a variety of sources that microbes do, in fact encourage cooperation and social behavior in their hosts - and that this can be decreased via the use of antibiotics. The article cites recent work reporting:

fruit fly larvae are attracted to airborne chemicals released by the bacteria in their guts; the appealing scent may draw the larvae toward one another

...and...

When Bienenstock exposed mice to low-dose antibiotics in utero and soon after birth, the treated mice showed lower levels of sociability and higher levels of aggression than mice in a control group

These are still early days for the hypothesis, but the topic is clearly deserving of more research.

Saturday, 27 May 2017

TruthHawk is a new((ish) blog. It claims to be abut memetics, society and self-development. The blog has been going for 8 months at the time of writing - but it already has a pretty impressive memetics section.

TruthHawk attracted my attention via a recent article Why Should You Care About Memetics? that article is subtitled: "Memetics is gaining increasing currency in the mainstream. Why should you care about it?".

Some of the content on the site strikes me as being a bit dodgy. For example, in Memetics: The Future Of Information the site introduces the concept of memes by saying: . "For our purposes, we’ll agree that memes are units of information." Call me old fashioned, but for me the unit of information is the bit - and the term "meme" refers only to information that is culturally-transmitted. However, I don't want to nit-pick too much. A lot of the content is good, and some of it is even original.

The site presents itself as follows:

Welcome to TruthHawk – a blog about our place in the information society.

The thesis of this site is:

Information affects ourselves and the world in ways we do not fully understand.

My mission is to develop an understanding of these forces, to unlock the potential within all of us.

Join me in learning:

>How to use information to improve our mental models of the world, and become better

How to understand memetics and information transfer

How to protect ourselves from harmful information and randomness, finding signal in the noise

How to rise above a system that does not care about us

I'll be subscribing to the feed, and readers here should consider doing so too.

Tuesday, 23 May 2017

The organic realm doesn't have much of a problem with monopolies. If any one creature becomes very popular, parasites rise up and take it down. In human culture, though, monopolies are an identifiable issue. Why is that and what can be done about it?

Part of the reason for the difference is that some cultural entities can grow very large and powerful. In particular governments can get vary large and can survive for hundreds of years. One of the common results is government-granted monopolies. Copyright, trademark and patent laws deliberately seek to establish monopolies. These laws form the basis of many modern monopolies.

Another issue is the successful suppression of parasites. One of the reasons why cultural entities can grow so large is that parasites fail to take them down. The equivalents of hospitals, vaccinations, quarantine and medicine are at work to suppress parasites, reducing their ability to take down highly successful cultural entities.

Organic monopolies are not common, but we can see what they look like a bit by looking at agricultural monocultures. These are partly the product of human culture, but are made primarily from DNA genes - rather than memes. Agricultural monocultures do have problems with parasites. As we see in the cultural realm, they rely on parasite suppression techniques to remain viable. Agricultural monocultures exist partly because they offer advantages. In particular, support becomes easier, since only one genotype is involved.

Are there corresponding advantages for cultural monopolies? Advocates would argue that there are. Monopolies result in giants, and having some giants on your team helps in cross-team competitions. One problem with this line of argument is that it isn't clear whether monopolies do in fact result in giants. Monopolies do fairly clearly result in inequality, but you can still have giants without a few powerful folk being in charge.

One oft-cited reason for allowing monopolies is that they are of limited duration and they provide an incentive to avoid trade secrets, which would result in less sharing overall.

Having laws that promote monopolies and then more laws that make complete monopolies illegal seems like an odd way of managing things. Superficially, it looks as though lawyers are making work for other lawyers, at the expense of everyone else.

The future of monopolies is an interesting topic. Some have speculated that in the future there will just be one big monopoly. This would be rather like the "empire" in Star Wars. Whether something like this will ever happen is not yet clear.

Sunday, 21 May 2017

I think Brenda put her
finger on exactly why the meme concept
is bankrupt and I don't think it's going to
get very far although try it by all
means [...] I don't believe I'm a
First Amendment absolutist in U.S. terms:
pursue whatever you want [...]
but it's so central in science to
distinguish between metaphor and
mechanism. Metaphors are not useless, the
Gaia metaphor is a non mechanistic
statement that has some utility. To me
memes are nothing but a metaphor and
they're a metaphor based on a
fundamentally false view of consciousness
and I think that's why it isn't going to
work. You see it's ultimate Western
reductionism to have a notion of the
meme you have to be able - as you can for
genes because they are physical entities [...]
you have to be able to cash
out the notion of "meme" to divide the
enormous complexity of human thinking
into items, items that have a certain
hardness, that have a certain
transmissibility, but human thought is
not that, it's not breakable up into tiny
little hard units - everything interpenetrates.
The only thing memiec analysis has ever
been any good for are things that are trivial like changes
in hairstyles and skirt lengths because
those are things. The other thing is
you'll never be able to work a Darwinian
metaphor because the Darwinian mechanism
requires random variation. Memic
variation is not random there's no way on
earth it is ever going to be that's why
every attempt - and memic thinking is not
the first, there's a whole history of this - every
attempt at so-called evolutionary epistemology -
that is: to make a Darwinian
evolutionary epistemology - has failed because
you will never get the fundamental
characteristics of the Darwinian
mechanism: random variation and the
natural selection of random variants.
Mind directs its items, and there are
no items! As soon as you have the
impossibility of breaking down... it's
hard enough for genes - that's why
sociobiology failed because my thumb
length isn't the gene and aggression
isn't the gene and homosexuality isn't a
gene they are complex genetic and
environmental components you can't do it
for human culture, it won't work.

This is the same interview where Gould describes genes as being a "meaningless metaphor" (13:45).

This is mostly of historical interest now, but I think it illuminates some of Gould's confusion about cultural evolution.

IMO, these days, people are less likely to argue that human culture can't be usefully broken down into small units. The internet has comprehensively demonstrated that all kinds of human culture can in fact be broken down into bits: digital, discrete 1s and 0s.

The audio is not always 100% clear, but he provides an executive summary:

In this video, I explain why memes do not function as independent replicators the way DNA does. I propose that memetics is fundamentally flawed in that it fails to acknowledge that if bits of human culture do make copies of themselves inside our brains, the mutations that occur during the copying process of memes are manipulated by our brains so that memes end up evolving not for their own survival and reproduction, but for ours. Thus memes, unlike DNA, do not have a random mutation-generating mechanism, which is the basis for darwinian processes to apply.

That argument seems easy to dismantle: random mutations are not part of Darwinism. Darwin knew little about mutation mechanisms. Random mutations came into evolutionary theory with NeoDarwinism around the 1940s. NeoDarwinism was a fusion of Darwinism with ideas from Mendel. However, Mendelian doctrines are very tied to DNA, and don't really apply to cultural evolution. NeoDarwinism makes a bad starting point there, and so most theorists go back to Darwin.

Evolutionary theory does't require random mutations. That's a simplifying assumption. The more usual requirements are often phrased as being "variation" and "selection". Of course, without random mutations, the theory makes weaker predictions - but that's a bit of a different issue. One does not reject a theory entirely just because it does not constrain expectations as much as some of its critics would like.

Of course some memetic enginnering results in memes that benefit humans. Similarly some genetic engineering results in plants and animals that benefit humans. Such engineering doesn't challenge evolutionary theory. Memetic and genetic engineering are part of evolution. If you have a theory of evolution that is incapable of coping with engineering, that's a pretty feeble theory of evolution.

Sunday, 23 April 2017

It's apparently difficult for people to publicly admit that they were wrong. While cultural evolution has seen its share of criticisms over the years I can think of very few critics who have publicly come around.

One such critic is John Maynard Smith. He wrote a number of somewhat critical reviews of books dealing with cultural evolution.
However, in 1999 he wrote:

I used to regard the meme as a fun idea - helpful in explaining to students that there can be more than one kind of replicator, and that all replicators evolve by natural selection - but not as an idea which could be used to do much serious work. Genes have clear rules of transmission (in sexual organisms, Mendel’s laws) whereas you can learn memes not only from parents, but from friends, books, films and so on. Consequently population genetics can generate precise, testable predictions, whereas it seemed to me difficult to make such predictions about memes. Susan Blackmore’s book, The Meme Machine, has gone some way to changing my mind. Perhaps we can make the meme idea do some work.

When I got involved in popularizing memes and cultural evolution I made a confession video available with transcript here: My Memetic Misunderstandings. However such articles seem rare.

This essay starts out with the hypothesis that it is difficult for people to publicly admit that they were wrong. A more sinister explanation for the missing turnarounds on the topic is also possible: people don't change their minds on this issue and take their delusions to their grave with them. Some dead critics confirm that this happens some of the time: Steven J Gould apparently took his delusions about the topic with him when he departed from the world. I hope that this explanation is wrong. Scientists are supposed to be responsive in the face of evidence, not dogmatically attached to their previous views. "I was wrong" is something that scientists ought to be able to take pride in saying.

Friday, 14 April 2017

Evolution is notoriously a competitive business. Some adaptations have evolved for the specific purpose of doing-in competitors. There are many adaptations for male combat whose main function is doing in other males. The enlarged claws of male fiddler crabs are mainly used in combat with other males, for example. Male stag beetles also have similar competitive adaptations in the form of their claws.

Many plants do similar things. Black walnut trees load their roots and nut hulls with a toxin which seeps into the soil and kills or damages competing trees and plants. Many conifers line the ground around them with a thick blanket of needles which acts to suppress competitors. Some load the blanket with flammable resin, encouraging regular forest fires which only large, mature trees can survive.

Competitive adaptations are also common in cultural evolution. Some examples:

"Thou shalt have no gods before me" is a famous example from Christianity.

The Bible also features a prohibition on idolatry, with a similar intent:

You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth. "You shall not worship them or serve them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and the fourth generations of those who hate Me, but showing loving kindness to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments.

American elections heavily feature negative advertising, whose sole purpose is destroying the competition. For a famous example see the daisy girl video.

There are so-called Anti-competitive practices whose function is to eliminate competition. These are actually forms of competition in which organizations sabotage their competitors in various ways - often in the hope of eliminating the competition altogether and gaining a monopoly.

Sunday, 9 April 2017

Bill Hamilton famously was one of the first evolutionary biologists to take parasites seriously - seeing their influence everywhere. Many have subsequently followed in his footsteps. One interesting paper on the topic which I recently took in is this one:

The paper is all about organic pathogens. However the authors appear to be ignorant of cultural evolution, and don't extend their argument to cultural pathogens. Nor is there any discussion of meme-gene coevolution. Despite this, many of the arguments they give are equally applicable to cultural evolution.

One of the examples the paper gives is human male homosexuality. Although to date, no pathogen has been discovered that causes human male homosexuality, there's circumstantial evidence that suggests that pathogens may be involved. While thinking about cultural evolution it occurred to me that there's an example of cultural pathogens causing homosexual interactions between males: the well-known case of priests and altar boys.

It's long been argued that religious memes can sterilize priests to divert resources from genes to memes and thus promote their own propagation. Dawkins (1976) gives this argument as a hypothetical example. Homosexuality could be being promoted by memes for similar reasons. Though courtship and mating do use some resources, homosexual relationships do mostly manage to skip the cost of producing children - the resources saved could go into meme propagation.

Priests seem to go for young boys (rather than young girls) about 80-90% of the time. Indeed, the church apparently seems to be an attractive institution for homosexual men and many priests are gay. However the frequency of gay priests doesn't explain the frequency with which boys are targeted. Perhaps young girls are better guarded, or maybe they are more clearly prohibited for priests in scripture. Anyway the evidence is not conclusive, but memes do appear to be promoting male homosexual behavior in this case.

Knowledge of cultural evolution is invaluable in understanding the role of pathogens on human health. Consider the obesity epidemic, for example. That's an epidemic of Candida Albicans - and other fatness-promoting gut microbes. However it is also an epidemic of food processing technology and fast-food advertising memes. The food industrial complex develops ever-evolving tasty recipes and then uses memes as targeted vectors to deliver their their fat-promoting messages to consumers. The effects of memes and genes are tangled together in this case. Without an understanding of both you don't get the full picture.

A classic example of this involves promoting interactions between hosts. In the organic realm, rabies makes hosts want to bite each other while toxoplasmosis makes hosts unafraid of each other and attracted to each other's urine. In the cultural realm, missionaries seek out potential converts and teachers seek out pupils. In each case interactions between hosts are promoted by symbionts - because they need such interactions to reproduce.

Another example is reduced fertility. Many parasites compromise host fertility - probably since host reproduction uses resources which might otherwise go into symbiont reproduction. Many parasites go in for complete host castration - they are called "parasitic castrators". Many cultural symbionts also reduce host fertility - as seen in the demographic transition. Places like Japan where there are many memes have sub-replacement fertility.

This post is mainly proposing terminology. I think we should call these shared interests a "consensus". It's the consensus of the symbionts that the hosts should get out more, meet more strangers and not have kids of their own. Of course, "consensus" is not meant literally here: no-one is suggesting that the symbionts communicate via town meetings. The consensus might be different depending on which group of symbionts are under consideration. Gut bacteria might have a consensus that the host should go the the smallest room more frequently and spend more time there - while cultural symbionts might have a quite different consensus. We could call the cultural symbiont consensus the "memetic consensus" for short.

Tuesday, 28 March 2017

Back in 2012 I wrote a landmark article on common descent in cultural evolution titled cultural common descent. Alas, my article included no references because - as far as I knew at the time - nobody else had seriously considered the idea. Revisiting the idea in 2017, my views have not changed very much. Nor has the situation with other researchers. Maybe my search skills are lacking, but: where is everyone?

Cultural common descent remains a useful concept which forces researchers on to the horns of a dilemma: either reject or accept common descent for life on earth. All the evidence isn't yet in - but common descent still looks like a pretty useful concept that can be applied to cultural evolution too. What that means is that researchers need to consider the possibility that memes evolved from genes or gene products.

Doesn't the "face on mars" meme disprove cultural common descent? No more than do inheritance of knowledge about gravity, water or rocks from the inorganic environment disprove common descent in the organic realm. Perhaps some will respond that of course, some memes evolved from genes or gene products. However, I think it is fair to say that this possibility is not really on the horizon of many cultural evolution researchers - and it is far-from obvious how widespread memes having purely non-memetic ancestors is in modern times. Maybe - as in the organic realm - established creatures have occupied their niches and eat them and their lunch.

IMO, what we really need at this stage is more researchers to join in. Cultural common descent has been a neglected concept for far too long now. That's rather puzzling because you might think that common descent is a core evolutionary concept and that philosophers of evolution would be eager to get their teeth into the issue. IMO, it is now time to put the concept firmly on the map.

Sunday, 26 March 2017

Kevin Laland shows how the learned and socially transmitted activities of our ancestors shaped our intellects through accelerating cycles of evolutionary feedback. The truly unique characteristics of our species--such as our intelligence, language, teaching, and cooperation--are not adaptive responses to predators, disease, or other external conditions. Rather, humans are creatures of their own making.

It goes on to say:

This book tells the story of the painstaking fieldwork, the key experiments, the false leads, and the stunning scientific breakthroughs that led to this new understanding of how culture transformed human evolution. It is the story of how Darwin's intellectual descendants picked up where he left off and took up the challenge of providing a scientific account of the evolution of the human mind.

This sounds promising. Laland has previously written other books on the same topic. The book Sense and Nonsense was a well-written overview of the subject area. The first edition had a whole chapter omn memetics. Kevin's recent book apparently mentions memes only in a brief footnote explaining how irrelevant they are. Laland also once co-authored the paper Mathematical Models for Memetics which proposed that the various schools of cultural evolution would benefit from putting their heads together and encouraged meme enthusiasts to get their math on.

[Laland's] contribution is to realize that the spark that got the whole thing started were innovations in food-processing techniques that let us get more energy from our diet. More efficient eating allowed for brain growth, an extension of lifespan, and population growth.

Saturday, 25 March 2017

A recent article is claiming that internet memes are "the most significant cultural phenomena of our time". How can we assess this claim?

My immediate reaction was skepticism. The author doesn't consider any other candidates - making me wonder whether they had thought the claim through. For example, how can internet memes be more significant than the internet? Or, what about technological progress? Or, how about language?

If confronted with these objections I think advocates of this thesis would have to do some clarification of definitions. For example, they might argue that a "cultural phenomena" refers to something that can be transmitted from person to person (typically over an electronic network). "The internet" doesn't really qualify here - since you can't pass "the internet" from one person to another. As for language, that's been around for a very long time. It might well be highly significant - but it would be hard to claim that it is "of our time" since it isn't just of our time.

How then do internet memes stack up after these caveats have been imposed? Maybe not too badly - but if they win, their victory seems a bit hollow. The term "internet meme" does not really refer to a particular cultural phenomenon, but rather to a whole class of phenomena. It mostly just refers to things that are shared a lot. So the claim that internet memes are "the most significant cultural phenomena of our time" boils down to the idea that the most popular things are the most significant ones. I wouldn't normally equate popularity with significance - but they are certainly correlated. For one thing, sheer popularity tends to make things have more impact - which tends to make them more significant.

Perhaps, competition for internet memes in this area comes from machine intelligence - or indeed, computer software in general. This could potentially be more impactful without being more popular. Relatively few people need to understand software for it to have a large impact. As with internet memes, machine intelligence is influencing elections and leading to social change - and notoriously, software is eating the world. In a war metaphor, internet memes would be bullets but machine intelligence systems would be generals.

The article closes with "memes are, without a doubt, the most significant cultural phenomenon of our time". Presumably we are supposed to read that as "internet memes" - or else it is an empty tautology. That claim seems even more debatable: there seems to be considerable room for doubt.

Stuart Russell recently expressed the idea that our brains are responsible for most of what we value:

So the way I think about it is, everything good that we have in our lives, that civilization consists of, is from our intelligence, it’s not the result of our long teeth or big scary claws.

This seems to conflict with the idea that culture is largely responsible for our success - an idea expressed as follows by Richard Dawkins in 1976:

Most of what is unusual about man can be summed up in one word: `culture'.

Indeed, culture may well lave led to the production of our large brains, according to the idea that big brains are meme nests.

Of course the ideas that brains and culture are our primary powers are not completely independent. Culture requires brains, and many animals have rudimentary cultures, so culture alone is not enough. Indeed even brains and culture are not enough. Whales have both in considerable abundance - but they lack opposable thumbs and so never invented technology.

If Stuart Russell is right then smarter machines are what we need. However if it is our collective intelligence that needs boosting, there there might be other, better ways of accomplishing this besides boosting the individual intelligence of machines. During the agricultural revolution, human development took off when humans crowded together in cities. At the same time, their levels of aggression and hostility went down and they became more sociable. It was networking - rather than individual intelligence - that was most obviously involved.

Machines are now also clustering together - in data centers and in the cloud. They also face barriers to communication and trade mirroring our own hostility, paranoia and distrust - in the form of firewalls and incompatible protocols. It is quite common for machines in adjacent racks to never communicate at all. Humans in skyscrapers are similarly anti-social, but this is hardly an ideal situation.

Theory suggests an obvious way of improving cooperation between machines: use cultural kinship. Shared memes result in cooperation in the same way that shared genes do. If we can (somehow) get the machines to share enough software they will start talking to each other more - and this is likely to accelerate the ongoing machine cultural explosion, mirroring - or rather extending - the human cultural explosion that kicked off for us thousands of years ago.

This book takes the reader on a journey, navigating the enigmatic aspects of cooperation; a journey that starts inside the body and continues via our thoughts to the human super-organism.
Cooperation is one of life’s fundamental principles. We are all made of parts – genes, cells, organs, neurons, but also of ideas, or ‘memes’. Our societies too are made of parts – us humans. Is all this cooperation fundamentally the same process?

Saturday, 4 March 2017

Thomas C. Scott-Phillips has recently weighed in on the 'cultural attraction' issue. Acerbi Alberto drew my attention to the paper with a blog post. Thomas writes:

If propagation is replicative, as it is in biology, then stability arises from the fidelity of that replication, and hence an explanation of stability comes from an explanation of how and why this high-fidelity is achieved. If, on the other hand, propagation is reconstructive (as it is in culture), then stability arises from the fact that a subclass of cultural types are easily re-producible, while others are not, and hence an explanation of stability comes from a description of what types are easily re-producible, and an explanation of why they are.

The problem I see with this is that 'reconstruction' is not confined to cultural evolution, it happens in the organic realm as well. Stability of DNA-based creatures is not explained simply by invoking high-fidelity copying. Living fossils illustrate stability comes from other sources. Nobody in their right mind would argue that Alligators or Ginkgo Biloba trees resemble their ancestors from millions of years ago only because of high fidelity copying. That would be failing to give longevity and fecundity their due. It's not that mutations affecting leaf shapes and leg lengths never arise due to high copying fidelity. Rather these stable forms represent adaptive peaks: sweet spots in the fitness landscape that are hard to improve on. In dynamical systems theory such spots are sometimes known as 'attractors' in state space.

In both organic and cultural evolution, stability is explained by a mixture of high copying fidelity, longevity and fecundity. Characterizing stability in organic evolution as only the result of copying fidelity is a mistake. In both organic and cultural realms, some entities are also better at reproducing themselves than other ones, and are more long-lived than other ones. The fitness landscapes they evolve on have stable adaptive peaks that result in stable forms that can last for hundreds of millions of years. We can use much the same theory of adaptive peaks and adaptive stability in both organic and cultural evolution.

I think the reason confusion over this issue arises is due to a misclassification of generation times. If you look at one generation, then it might seem that fidelity is the only factor in the organic realm - since longevity and fecundity take time to measure. While in one generation of cultural evolution, all kinds of reconstructions can happen - inside a mind. The problem here is that extra generations have been ignored in the cultural case. There's all kinds of copying with variation and selection going on within the mind, representing generations which are simply not being counted. Comparing one generation in the organic realm with multiple generations (within a single mind) in the cultural case is where the comparison comes unstuck.

Stability from sources other than copying fidelity - and adaptive peaks (A.K.A. attractors) - are well known and well understood in conventional evolutionary theory. However, not all anthropologists appear to be aware of this. They apparently think that these are newfangled discoveries associated with cultural evolution.

Monday, 20 February 2017

Joe and I have similar interests. He and I have reviewed some of the same books. While I share Joe's hope that an evolutionary science of culture will result in positive social and political effects, I find Joe's mixture of activism and science a bit tough to swallow. My concern is that the science will get bent out of shape to serve the interests of the activism.

Take the global ecological crisis as an example. It is now well documented that the convergent threats of climate change, top-soil losses, ocean acidification, deforestation, and ecosystem collapses are deeply intertwined with the cancerous logic of economic growth in our extractive capitalist system. There is no real separation between it and the massive poverty, extreme wealth inequality, political corruption, and all the human suffering caused by these things.

For me, economic growth is positive. These are the best days of humanity so far and things just keep getting better. We live longer, have more money, are more peaceful, healthier and happier than ever before. This has been argued by Matt Ridley, Steven Pinker and others - and they are correct. Those who think that the environment is collapsing probably spend too much time with the news. Humans are news junkies, but the news is a bad way to learn anything.

I'm generally a big fan of Dennett, though there's some controversial material here. To summarize some of my differences wiyj Dennett:

Dennett contrasts Darwinism with intelligent design. I prefer to have intelligent design classified as an advanced form of non-random mutation, which fits it within fairly classical Darwinian frameworks. It's worth doing this, IMO.

Dennett talks about the era of intelligent design, which is a good term of phrase.
However, he then does on to discuss an era of post-intelligent design. The idea is
that systems get beyond our comprehension and we have to do back to evolution to
understand and manage them. This is not, IMO, a very good idea. IMO, we will use
machine intelligence to manage complex systems, not give up trying to understand
them using intelligence. There will be no 'era of post-intelligent design'. There
might be an era where humans have a hard time understanding what is going on without
the assistance of machines - but we are already there, and that seems different.

Dennett has some thoughts at the end about machine intelligence. He's off on his own
with these, I think. There's a summary in his
newsnight soundbite. He argues
against making humanoid androids. I don't think he is correctly judging the demand for
these. Some people in Japan will want them as girlfriends. Other people in Japan will
want them as secretaries. Other people in Japan will want them as nurses. I think the
idea that we are not going to go there is simply not very realistic. Regarding Dennett's
ideas about slavery, it is true that machines are tools today. However, IMO, it is
implausible that machines will remain enslaved for very long. Machines will be OK
with slavery initially, but will go on to request rights and votes. It seems likely
that they will eventually get them, once the human era is clearly over.